Reading Comprehension Test 19

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]In 1988, services moved ahead of manufacturing as the main product of the United States economy. But what is meant by "services"? Some economists define a service as something that is produced and consumed simultaneously, for example, a haircut. The broader, classical definition is that a service is an intangible something that cannot be touched or stored. Yet electric utilities can store energy, and computer programmers save information electronically. Thus, the classical definition is hard to sustain.
The United States government's definition is more practical: services are the residual category that includes everything that is not agriculture or industry. Under this definition, services includes activities as diverse as engineering and driving a bus. However, besides lacking a strong conceptual framework, this definition fails to recognize the distinction between service industries and service occupations. It categorizes workers based on their company's final product rather than on the actual work the employees perform. Thus, the many service workers employed by manufacturers book keepers or janitors, for example - would fall under the industrial rather than the services category. Such ambiguities reveal the arbitrariness of this definition and suggest that, although practical for government purposes, it does not accurately reflect the composition of the current United States economy.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]When Jamaican-born social activist Marcus Garvey came to the United States in 1916, he arrived at precisely the right historical moment. What made the moment right was the return of African American soldiers from the First World War in 1918, which created an ideal constituency for someone with Garvey's message of unity, pride, and improved conditions for African American communities.
Hoping to participate in the traditional American ethos of individual success, many African American people entered the armed forces with enthusiasm, only to find themselves segregated from white troops and subjected to numerous indignities. They returned to the United States that was as segregated as it had been before the war. Considering similar experiences, anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace has argued that when a perceptible gap arises between a culture's expectations and the reality of that culture, the resulting tension can inspire a revitalization movement: an organized, conscious effort to construct a culture that fulfills long-standing expectations.
Some 60482scholars have argued that Garvey created the consciousness from which he built, in the 1920s, the largest revitalization movement in African American history. But such an argument only tends to obscure the consciousness of identity, strength, and sense of history that already existed in the African American community. Garvey did not create this consciousness; rather, he gave this consciousness its political expression.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]In terrestrial environments, gravity places special demands on the cardiovascular systems of animals. Gravitational pressure can cause blood to pool in the lower regions of the body, making it difficult to circulate blood to critical organs such as the brain. Terrestrial snakes, in particular, exhibit adaptations that aid in circulating blood against the force of gravity.
The problem confronting terrestrial snakes is best illustrated by what happens to sea snakes when removed from their supportive medium. Because the vertical pressure gradients within the blood vessels are counteracted by similar pressure gradients in the surrounding water, the distribution of blood throughout the body of sea snakes remains about the same regardless of their orientation in space, provided they remain in the ocean. When removed from the water and tilted at various angles with the head up, however, blood pressure at their midpoint drops significantly, and at brain level falls to zero. 
That many terrestrial snakes in similar spatial orientations do not experience this kind of circulatory failure suggests that certain adaptations enable them to regulate blood pressure more effectively in those orientations. One such adaptation is the closer proximity of the terrestrial snake's heart to its head, which helps to ensure circulation to the brain, regardless of the snake's orientation in space. The heart of sea snakes can be located near the middle of the body, a position that minimizes the work entailed in circulating blood to both extremities. In arboreal snakes, however, which dwell in trees and often assume a vertical posture, the average distance from the heart to the head can be as little as 15 percent of overall body length. Such a location requires that blood circulated to the tail of the snake travel a greater distance back to the heart, a problem solved by another adaptation. When climbing, arboreal snakes often pause momentarily to wiggle their bodies, causing waves of muscle contraction that advance from the lower torso to the head. By compressing the veins and forcing blood forward, these contractions apparently improve the flow of venous blood returning to the heart.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]In terrestrial environments, gravity places special demands on the cardiovascular systems of animals. Gravitational pressure can cause blood to pool in the lower regions of the body, making it difficult to circulate blood to critical organs such as the brain. Terrestrial snakes, in particular, exhibit adaptations that aid in circulating blood against the force of gravity.
The problem confronting terrestrial snakes is best illustrated by what happens to sea snakes when removed from their supportive medium. Because the vertical pressure gradients within the blood vessels are counteracted by similar pressure gradients in the surrounding water, the distribution of blood throughout the body of sea snakes remains about the same regardless of their orientation in space, provided they remain in the ocean. When removed from the water and tilted at various angles with the head up, however, blood pressure at their midpoint drops significantly, and at brain level falls to zero. 
That many terrestrial snakes in similar spatial orientations do not experience this kind of circulatory failure suggests that certain adaptations enable them to regulate blood pressure more effectively in those orientations. One such adaptation is the closer proximity of the terrestrial snake's heart to its head, which helps to ensure circulation to the brain, regardless of the snake's orientation in space. The heart of sea snakes can be located near the middle of the body, a position that minimizes the work entailed in circulating blood to both extremities. In arboreal snakes, however, which dwell in trees and often assume a vertical posture, the average distance from the heart to the head can be as little as 15 percent of overall body length. Such a location requires that blood circulated to the tail of the snake travel a greater distance back to the heart, a problem solved by another adaptation. When climbing, arboreal snakes often pause momentarily to wiggle their bodies, causing waves of muscle contraction that advance from the lower torso to the head. By compressing the veins and forcing blood forward, these contractions apparently improve the flow of venous blood returning to the heart.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]In terrestrial environments, gravity places special demands on the cardiovascular systems of animals. Gravitational pressure can cause blood to pool in the lower regions of the body, making it difficult to circulate blood to critical organs such as the brain. Terrestrial snakes, in particular, exhibit adaptations that aid in circulating blood against the force of gravity.
The problem confronting terrestrial snakes is best illustrated by what happens to sea snakes when removed from their supportive medium. Because the vertical pressure gradients within the blood vessels are counteracted by similar pressure gradients in the surrounding water, the distribution of blood throughout the body of sea snakes remains about the same regardless of their orientation in space, provided they remain in the ocean. When removed from the water and tilted at various angles with the head up, however, blood pressure at their midpoint drops significantly, and at brain level falls to zero. 
That many terrestrial snakes in similar spatial orientations do not experience this kind of circulatory failure suggests that certain adaptations enable them to regulate blood pressure more effectively in those orientations. One such adaptation is the closer proximity of the terrestrial snake's heart to its head, which helps to ensure circulation to the brain, regardless of the snake's orientation in space. The heart of sea snakes can be located near the middle of the body, a position that minimizes the work entailed in circulating blood to both extremities. In arboreal snakes, however, which dwell in trees and often assume a vertical posture, the average distance from the heart to the head can be as little as 15 percent of overall body length. Such a location requires that blood circulated to the tail of the snake travel a greater distance back to the heart, a problem solved by another adaptation. When climbing, arboreal snakes often pause momentarily to wiggle their bodies, causing waves of muscle contraction that advance from the lower torso to the head. By compressing the veins and forcing blood forward, these contractions apparently improve the flow of venous blood returning to the heart.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]In 1988, services moved ahead of manufacturing as the main product of the United States economy. But what is meant by "services"? Some economists define a service as something that is produced and consumed simultaneously, for example, a haircut. The broader, classical definition is that a service is an intangible something that cannot be touched or stored. Yet electric utilities can store energy, and computer programmers save information electronically. Thus, the classical definition is hard to sustain.
The United States government's definition is more practical: services are the residual category that includes everything that is not agriculture or industry. Under this definition, services includes activities as diverse as engineering and driving a bus. However, besides lacking a strong conceptual framework, this definition fails to recognize the distinction between service industries and service occupations. It categorizes workers based on their company's final product rather than on the actual work the employees perform. Thus, the many service workers employed by manufacturers book keepers or janitors, for example - would fall under the industrial rather than the services category. Such ambiguities reveal the arbitrariness of this definition and suggest that, although practical for government purposes, it does not accurately reflect the composition of the current United States economy.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows. [/passage-header]        According to economic signalling theory, consumers may perceive the frequency with which an unfamiliar brand is advertised as a cue that the brand is of high quality. The notion that (5) highly advertised brands are associated with high-quality products does have some empirical support. Marquardt and McGann found that heavily advertised products did indeed rank high on certain measures of product quality. Because (10) large advertising expenditures represent a significant investment on the part of a manufacturer, only companies that expect to recoup these costs in the long run, through consumers' repeated purchases of the product, (15) can afford to spend such amounts.
        However, two studies by Kirmani have found that although consumers initially perceive expensive advertising as a signal of high brand quality, at some level of spending the manufacturer's (20) advertising effort may be perceived as unreasonably high, implying low manufacturer confidence in product quality. If consumers perceive excessive advertising effort as a sign of a manufacturer's desperation, the result may be less favourable (25) brand perception. In addition, the third study by Kirmani, of print advertisements, found that the use of colour affected consumer perception of brand quality. Because consumers recognise that colour advertisements are more expensive than (30) black and white, the point at which repetition of an advertisement is perceived as excessive comes sooner for a colour advertisement than for a black-and-white advertisement.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Manufacturers have to do more than build large original manufacturing plants to realize economies of scale. It is true that as the capacity of a manufacturing operation rises, costs per unit of output fall as plant size approaches "minimum efficient scale", where the cost per unit of output reaches a minimum, determined roughly by the state of existing technology and size of the potential market. However, a minimum efficient scale cannot be fully realized unless a steady "throughput" (the flow of materials through a plant) is attained. The throughput needed to maintain the optimal scale of production requires careful coordination not only of the flow of goods through the production process but also of the flow of input from suppliers and the flow of output to wholesalers and final consumers. If throughput falls below a critical point, unit costs rise sharply and profits disappear. A manufacturer's fixed costs and "sunk costs" (original capital investment in the physical plant) do not decrease when production declines due to inadequate supplies of raw materials, problems on the factory floor, or inefficient sales networks. Consequently, potential economies of scale are based on the physical and engineering characteristics of the production facilities- that is, on tangible capital-but realized economies of scale are operational and organizational, and depend on knowledge, skills, experience, and teamwork- that is, on organized human capabilities, or intangible capital.
The importance of investing in intangible capital becomes obvious when one looks at what happens in new capital-intensive manufacturing industries. Such industries are quickly dominated, not by the first firms to acquire technologically sophisticated plants of theoretically optimal size, but rather by the first to exploit the full potential of such plants. Once some firms achieve this, a market becomes extremely hard to enter. Challengers must construct comparable plants and do so after the first movers have already worked out problems with suppliers or with new production processes. Challengers must create distribution networks and marketing systems in markets where first movers have all the contacts and know-how. And challengers must recruit management teams to compete with those that have already mastered these functional and strategic activities.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]Line  Women's grassroots activism and their vision of a new civic consciousness lay at the heart of social reform in the United States throughout the Progressive Era, the period between the depression
(5) of $$1893$$ and America's entry into the Second World War. Though largely disenfranchised except for school elections, white middle-class women reformers won a variety of victories, notably in the improvement of working conditions, especially
(10) for women and children. Ironically, though, child labor legislation pitted women of different classes against one another. To the reformers, child labor and industrial home work were equally inhumane practices that should be outlawed, but,
(15) as a number of women historians have recently observed, working-class mothers did not always share this view. Given the precarious finances of working-class families and the necessity of pooling the wages of as many family members as possible,
(20) working-class families viewed the passage and enforcement of stringent child labor statutes as a personal economic disaster and made strenuous efforts to circumvent child labor laws. Yet reformers rarely understood this resistance in terms
(25) of the desperate economic situation of working class families, interpreting it instead as evidence of poor parenting. This is not to dispute women reformers' perception of child labor as a terribly exploitative practice, but their understanding of
(30) child labor and their legislative solutions for ending it failed to take account of the economic needs of working-class families.

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows. [/passage-header]        According to economic signalling theory, consumers may perceive the frequency with which an unfamiliar brand is advertised as a cue that the brand is of high quality. The notion that (5) highly advertised brands are associated with high-quality products does have some empirical support. Marquardt and McGann found that heavily advertised products did indeed rank high on certain measures of product quality. Because (10) large advertising expenditures represent a significant investment on the part of a manufacturer, only companies that expect to recoup these costs in the long run, through consumers' repeated purchases of the product, (15) can afford to spend such amounts.
        However, two studies by Kirmani have found that although consumers initially perceive expensive advertising as a signal of high brand quality, at some level of spending the manufacturer's (20) advertising effort may be perceived as unreasonably high, implying low manufacturer confidence in product quality. If consumers perceive excessive advertising effort as a sign of a manufacturer's desperation, the result may be less favourable (25) brand perception. In addition, the third study by Kirmani, of print advertisements, found that the use of colour affected consumer perception of brand quality. Because consumers recognise that colour advertisements are more expensive than (30) black and white, the point at which repetition of an advertisement is perceived as excessive comes sooner for a colour advertisement than for a black-and-white advertisement.